setting boundaries

December 01, 2014

"What a b---- he turned out to be." The b---- my friend Cate is talking about is her first-born, 25-year-old son. He got his MBA last June and finally landed a career job this fall. But when Cate and the proud papa emailed him with a request to stop by to see him at his office--they would be in the neighborhood--he sent this email: "I appreciate the gesture, but i think it's time for you to stop visiting me at my workplace."

A few months ago, when he had been a summer intern at a high profile government agency, she had asked to stop by--she wanted to see what the department looked like inside. "All I got to see was the lobby and the cafeteria, where I bought him lunch." Now she was feeling put out about not being welcome in his latest workplace--or this latest phase of his life.

Comes to the same thing, no? Helicopter parenting has a sell-by date. Our kids are no longer singing in the chorus of the school play or playing for the local soccer team. When it comes to their career, there's no seat in the cheerleading section for us.

Not that I don't sympathize with Cate. It's hard to let go of that desire to experience up close and personally the bits and pieces of our grown kids' lives--the way we did when they were little kids and living under our roof. Our very own Uber son dis-invited us to his adult soccer league games. There were some hurt feelings on the parental side, but the only ones watching the game are a handful of girlfriends and wives. Having mummy or daddy there would probably make him feel, well, like a little boy. An office workplace has even higher stakes.

No one said letting go was easy. It's hard sometimes for us to believe there are boundaries between us and our children. But there are and should be. At least Cate's son was polite about laying down his mark.

October 23, 2013

Uh Oh. Here it comes again. Read any "advice" column and you come across the usual litany of complaints about us by our daughters-in-law or sons-in-law: We're too critical, judgmental, intrusive. We want them to run their households our way. We use money to control their vacations and other comings and goings. Some of us have made adjustments when we've recognized an untoward behavior but otherwise, when we read the columns, we just stew over the unfair picture of mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law.

Her in laws, a woman writes, "are too nice." Case in point: when her husband [the son] and and son [the grandchild] visit the mother/grandmother, she sends back "gifts." Unfortunately, they are usually "foods we're trying to avoid." Worse, each of the gifts "requires a special phone call of thanks." The in-laws also want phone calls anytime the family travels long distances or in bad weather. "They keep track of our kids' doctors' appointments so they can ask how everything went." What this Hax correspondent wants to know is whether there's a polite way "to get them to back off, just a little. We love them and appreciate that they are always there for us, but it's just too much of an emotional burden to handle their anxieties about our everyday life."

So what does Carolyn have to say about too much niceness? It is, she writes, a variation of smother love. "You describe a mother-in-law who is manipulative, controlling, insecure and boundary-challenged." Hax then asks whether the husband is "as uncomfortable with this as you are? Is he ready to
set some limits, or has he too bought into the “nice” canard? I
suspect you’d both benefit from reading on boundaries and emotional
manipulation. Don’t tune me out: The best read on this topic is “The
Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker. It will seem like a loopy
recommendation for “just” a fussy mom, but it’s actually square on
point."

Having suffered through a non-smothering but manipulative mother, I'm heading for the Gavin de Becker. Better late than never. Besides, I want to make sure I don't see myself in it--that all the "niceness" I like to confer on my children is above suspicion, that it is not turning me into a secret smother-mother or mother-in-law. I will report back on what I learn. Stay tuned.

May 28, 2012

When their daughter and son-in-law bought a house, the parents helped out--with advice and counseling (both solicited) on the building plans and by babysitting their grandson, especially on moving day. They also helped paint rooms and gave the young couple furnishings from their own house that they no longer needed.

Their problem, as they expressed it in a letter to Carolyn Hax, is one of feeling left out. The daughter planned a house warming party and didn't invite the parents. When the mom complained, the daughter told her she was "over the top" to be upset.The mom, who signed her letter, "sad and disappointed" expressed her pain this way: "It seems to us that we were good enough to do all the legwork but not good enough to be invited to the celebration."

Ah yes, The left out feeling. No one likes it. Being slighted is one of the least feel-good feelings in the world. And to be excluded by our own children! But as Hax pointed out, "when adult children live near their parents, they're faced with a small but sensitive puzzle: how to lead social lives that are both independent and inclusive."

Hax's advice to the mom, who said this was not the first time she felt like she was the "hired help rather than part of the family," was to look at the situation in a more positive light.Instead of saying "We're the hired help," the mom could tell herself, Hax writes, "We're already a huge part of their lives. I'm glad they'll have this time with friends."

In other words, we are often hurt when we get over-invested in our children's lives--and especially so when we expect them to repay our many "investments" with a coin from another country. We may love our children and they may love us, but we aren't --and shouldn't try to be -- their social life.

May 09, 2012

The travel section of a newspaper isn't the most likely place to find a story on a major parental adjustment. Dominque Browning managed to turn a trip to Boulder into a tale of her first journey, as a newly minted empty nester, to her youngest son's new nest and her recognition that she was no longer the homemaker-mom but a guest in her son's home.

Her son moved from the east coast to Boulder. Boulder's a fun town to visit--I won't go into those details--but Browning had some thoughtful insights on the experience of realizing her youngest son was a grown up with a home of his own--a home that was wasn't hers and that was, moreover, half way across the country.

Her first point: "There is a moment of truth all parents must face, usually on a sofa bed. Children eventually make their own lives, entirely separate from ours, and we participate in them only by invitation. It is a wise mother, indeed, who remembers the lessons that once came out of her mouth about how to be a good house guest."

About that sofa bed. It was another wake-up call. As Browning and her son settle in for her first night at his apartment, he let's her know where she'll be sleeping. She won't, he tells her, "be taking my bedroom. That's the master bedroom. I am the master. I don't want to sleep out here. This is the guest room." That was, Browning writes, "the moment. That was when I realized the earthshaking reality of having traveled to see my child, only to become a guest in his home. He was not my child, but my host, a grown-up. I could feel the tectonic plates of power shifting and grinding between us. A volcano of protest sputtered out, and I agreed that the living room, er, guest room, was the perfect place for me."

It is a shocker of a moment. I remember the first year when uber son and his family booked and paid for the vacation condo and, when we arrived, instead of commandeering the master bedroom--as we did lo those many years when we booked and paid for the condo--we were relegated to an upstairs bedroom that one of our grandchildren vacated to accommodate us. Not that we had any complaint. (Or that they hadn't graciously offered to move out for the three nights we would be there. They did offer. We declined.] It was breathtaking recognition that the tectonic-plate had shifted--we were no longer the masters in charge with all the rights and privileges that come with that master's degree.

Browning's blog follows up her New York Times travel piece, sharing with her readers the bits and pieces from her article that were left on the cutting room floor. Here's one item that struck home and that underlies my Note to Self about good housekeeping tips. Browning, it would appear, managed to find subtle ways to share such tips with her son, Theo:

"Driving my rental car to Target for supplies, Theo discussed the challenges of living on his own. “I think the tub leaks when I shower.” We bought shower curtains. “Isn’t it hard to pour boiling water from the pot to a teacup without spilling most of it?” We bought a kettle. “I should have taken the vacuum cleaner you offered me from home.” We bought a broom."

August 30, 2011

A lawyer friend is a high-powered, type-A attorney who's a very effective attack dog for his clients. The problem is, he sometimes applies that take-no-prisoners approach to his children's lives. Case in point: When his grown daughter had a big report due to the president of her company, he told her she should stop accepting invitations to various outings--she should be isolating herself in her office to get the big job done properly. It's exactly the way he would handle the pressure of an important brief or memo to a client.

Interfering in our children's lives: It's what we do--we can't help it. Sometimes it's egregious; sometimes it's just annoying or a little anecdote our grown children tell their friends about their mom or dad.

Why do we do it? Is it simply helicopter-parenting taken to the next level of our children's maturity? Are we simply being protective of our children? Do we want to ease the way with the benefit of lessons we learned the hard way? Whatever it is, we're on dangerous ground here. We lead our own lives--and just our own. Sometimes we get so invested in our children and their burgeoning careers that we may cross a line and forget who's in charge here. Whose life is it anyway?

On a blog that Theresa Froehlich writes, she notes the real danger of overdoing the pressure on the control button. "Every time I react with the compulsion to rescue my child, I am sending her the message that I don’t think she is capable."

August 25, 2011

One of my "notes to self" [see list to the left] is about housekeeping--a euphemism for putting our imprint on our grown child's home or for acting on "advice" by assuming it's wanted and warranted. This goes for dads as well as moms: No fixing things, no rearranging messy closets; no relining kitchen shelves--unless asked.

As Deborah Tannen points out in her book, "You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation," some of our housekeeping suggestions stem from concerns for their health and safety." Tannen describes a daughter's discomfort--a feeling that her mother was criticizing her husband--when the mother would come to visit and remind her daughter and son-in-law that "he should cut down the dying elm tree in the yard lest it fall and hurt somebody (it did eventually fall though no one was hurt), and replace the rotting step lest someone trip (it never was and no one ever did). Anyone would find these constant reminders annoying."But Tannen doesn't take the nagging parents to task. She addresses the grown children in saying, "Imagine the worry [the mother] endured each time she saw these threats to her loved ones' safety--and her frustration that they didn't undertake the simple repairs to eliminate the danger."

Point well taken. But, as Tannen points out, not all our observations, helpful hints and concerned commentary are so obviously linked to an urgent safety or health issue. Tannen describes a daughter who "cringed when her mother peered at the stove in her kitchen, lifting the protective pan under the grill to check to see whether the crumbs had been cleaned from beneath the pain--which, of course, they hadn't."

I may be overly sensitive on this point--I had such a mother; the grill pan was the least of it--but Tannen has given me a slightly different perspective on my reaction [grrrrr!) to my mother's good housekeeping exchanges. Rearranging my kitchen cabinets, re-doing my closets is not necessarily the criticism I took it to be. It's a problem of indirect communication. It can make an innocent remark or action come across as criticism. And indirectness. Tannen warns that the areas for setting off our grown child with an "innocent" comment are "the Big Three of appearance: hair, clothes, weight."

April 03, 2011

A friend's college-sophomore son came home for Spring break. Rule of the house: do your own laundry. But morning of day he was to leave and return to school, his room was piled high with dirty laundry. The mom was holding her ground on the rule when the dad asked his son to help him out at a soccer game he was coaching. The mom, liking the idea of father and son coaching together, decided she'd "help out" by doing her son's laundry. When she was dumping the first load from washer to dryer, she discovered she'd washed his wallet--it had been in the pocket of a dirty pair of pants. I'll let her words take the story from here:

"So i took everything out of the wallet to let things dry. And I found a fake ID [a driver's license form another state, giving his age as 21]. I was very upset about it. It's illegal to have such a thing and when our son was home at Christmas break, he'd gotten drunk with a friend and caused a commotion in our backyard that caused a neighbor to call the police. I didn't want to confront him with the fake ID so when everything was dry, I put it all back in the wallet --except the fake ID. I kept it.

"When he came home, I told him about washing the wallet by mistake. Later, as he was getting ready to leave for the airport, he went through it. And he asked, Wwhere's my ID?' I said, 'Your ID [his real license] is in your wallet.' Well, he got really angry and we were shouting at each other. I said the fake ID was illegal and that given the drinking problems last Christmas, this was no way to win back his parents trust. He said he didn't use it to buy liquor. He used it to get into concerts. The shouting went on. It got so bad I refused to drive him to the airport.

"He hasn't spoken to me since. I wrote him an email explaining why I did what I did and how I felt about fake IDs. He sent back a reply that was just short of saying f--- you."

What an issue! You find something illegal in your 20-year-old's possession, something that could, in the long run, bring him harm. But you found it going through his wallet--even though you didn't mean to be going through his personal items.

My friend says her friend with a son her son's age says, "all the kids have fake IDs. Forget about it." She doesn't buy that would-you-jump-off-the-cliff argument.

I asked a friend who has a 24-year-old son what he would have done. "It depends on what was going on in the household. Were the parents letting their son have parties in the home where his friends were allowed to drink? If so, they don't have much to stand on about using the fake ID to buy liquor. I would have taken the ID but talked to my son directly about it--about my concerns about under-age drinking. I wouldn't have waited for him to discover it was gone."

Paterfamilias, a lawyer when he's not a sounding-board dad, saw the situation differently. He was not primarily troubled by the illegal document but by the mom's actions. By his lights, she should not have looked in the wallet--should not have taken stuff out to dry. And if she did and found the fake ID, she should have tucked it back into the wallet. If there was an issue about drinking and his buying liquor with a fake ID, she should address that separately--not connect it to the fake ID. Going through his wallet, however inadvertent, and then using what she found there to confront her son, "breaks a bond of trust."

Another friend, whose youngest is 33, makes light of the "illegal" act. She had a fake ID when she was growing up in Brooklyn. All her friends did. LIke me, this friend had an intrusive mother. So she reacted as I did: "I would have tucked it back in and never said a word about it."

For some of us, a fake ID is not a big crime. But what if the item she found was worse--illegal drugs, say, or evidence of an interset in child pornography? Does that change the way a parent would react? It's a slippery slope between inadvertently finding damaging evidence and behaving like an intrusive snoop.

December 26, 2010

When our kids were young and living under our wing, parenting had a lot to do with setting boundaries. No, you may not go outside without me. Yes, you can have the car but you must be home by 10.

Now that they're grown up and living under their own powers, parenting still has a lot to do with setting boundaries--but this time it's all about our respecting those boundaries. An example of a worst-case scenario is in a recent column by Carolyn Hax. A woman in her mid-20s who lives in her own apartment and supports herself, complains that her parents "insist they are entitled to know my every move because they are my parents." If she doesn't respond to a phone message within 24 hours, they threaten to call the police. If she tries to withhold details of her Saturday night, "they become very angry and claim I'm disrespecting them."

If it sounds overboard and overly intrusive, it is. And yet, Hax assures the writer, "yours aren't the first parents to have boundary issues."

That's some of us she's talking about. The solution Hax suggests is for the daughter to employ a non-confrontational approach. She should answer general questions about how she is but if demands are made for "a transcript of Saturday night," the daughter can tell her parents that she's "not going to answer questions about tracking my movements." Another way to handle it, Hax says, is for the daughter to answer the question she wishes her parents had asked, as in "I'm doing great, thanks. How's work, Dad?"

When we find our kids evading our questions with that time-honored ploy, it may be a heads up that we're asking stuff that's over the boundary line. Hopefully, they'll tell all we need to know when they're ready.